Representational and the Presentational

Benny Shanon

Description

In this wide-ranging book the author presents his critique of the contemporary portrayal of cognition, an analysis of the conceptual foundations of cognitive science and a proposal for a new concept of the mind. Shanon argues that the representational account is seriously lacking and that far from serving as a basis of cognitive activity, representations are the products of such activity. He proposes an alternative view of the mind in which the basic capability of the cognitive system is not the manipulation of symbols but rather action in the world. His book offers a different outlook on the phenomenon of consciousness and presents a new conception of psychological theory and explanation. This revised second edition includes a new Postscript.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845405120
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
The Representational and the Presentational
An Essay on Cognition and the Study of Mind
Second Edition with New Postscript
Benny Shanon
imprint-academic.com



Publisher information
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Benny Shanon 1993; 2008
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
First published 1993 by Harvester Wheatsheaf
This edition originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA



Prologue
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde
Let me start with a question drawn from a domain quite different from the one I shall study in this book - the domain of figurative art. How should one go about drawing a human figure? Consider two answers actually given to this question in the artistic tradition of the West. The first is taken from the first modern theoretical essay on the art of painting, Leon Battista Alberti’s Delia Pittura (1435/1966):
He [the painter] has good memory. Before dressing a man we first draw him nude, then we enfold him in draperies. So in painting the nude we place first his bones and muscles which we then cover with flesh so that it is not difficult to understand where each muscle is beneath. (p. 73)
A different answer is given by Federico Zuccaro (1607/1961), the chief spokesman of seventeenth-century mannerism:
But I do say - and I know I speak the truth - that the art of painting does not derive its principles from the mathematical sciences, indeed it need not even refer to them. ... The painter ... becomes a skilful man through mere natural judgment. With proper care and observation ... without any aid from or need for mathematics ... the [artist’s] intellect must be not only clear but also free, and his spirit unfettered, and not thus restrained in mechanical servitude to such rules. ... We, professors of Design, have no need of other rules than those which Nature herself gives for imitating her. (p. 133)
The two answers present two fundamental ways to achieve the task defined by my opening question. The way advocated by mathematically minded Alberti regards the process of painting as one of model construction. The painter adopting this method would start with the skeleton, continue with the muscles, and eventually stretch the skin and cover it with garments. This step-by-step construction grounds the final, overt product in hidden, underlying structures; it is based on factual knowledge and is guided by the canons of reason. By contrast, Zuccaro directs the painter to focus his gaze on what there is on the surface and can be seen, on that which will eventually appear on the canvas - the skin and the garments. For this, the painter should put his faith in his eye and let it guide his hand. If the gaze is careful, the faith solid and the hand secure, he is certain to end up with the desired depiction.
Here, then, are two ways: one based on the mediation of structured knowledge, the other assuming the unmediated attuning of the observer to the objects of his or her inspection. Which is the better way? It seems to me that this is not the right question. Some painters would opt for the first way, others for the second, and surely one could not characterize the painters of either persuasion as being in any sense better or more accomplished than those of the other. But in fact, the two ways are not merely two ways of painting. They epitomize two ways of knowing, two ways by which the human mind may achieve understanding of the world.
Artists differ in their choice of the method of painting. Over the centuries, there have been recurrent debates between the followers of the two persuasions, and both ways have gained honourable places in the annals of artistic creation. The cognitive sciences have not been as tolerant. The contemporary study of both the human mind and the so-called artificial intelligence of computers is heavily biased towards one perspective, that based on the mediation of represented knowledge. Specifically, the conceptual dogma that in the past two decades has dominated cognitive science - cognitive psychology with its affiliated disciplines of cognitive social psychology, neuropsychology and anthropology as well as the discipline of artificial intelligence - is one defined by the following three tenets: (*) People behave by virtue of their possessing knowledge. Knowledge is constituted by mental representations. Cognitive activity consists in the manipulation of these representations, i.e. the application of computational operations to them.
The theoretical framework of which (*) is the basis will be referred to here as the representational-computational view of mind, henceforth RCVM or representationalism. This framework is presented most clearly in Fodor (1968a, 1975), Newell (1980) and Pylyshyn (1984); paradigmatic works embracing it include Newell and Simon (1972), Schank (1972), Anderson and Bower (1973), Kintsch (1974) and Norman and Rumelhart (1975).
This book attempts to mark the limitations of RCVM and to propose a more balanced psychological picture. The discussion will try to show that the representational-computational framework is inadequate in several fundamental respects and that it cannot offer the basis for a general theory of human behaviour. While the development of a full-fledged alternative psychological theory is beyond the scope of this book, general characteristics of non-representational, non-computational models of mind will be suggested. With these, the status and role of mental representations will be reappraised, new questions for psychological investigation will be formulated, and outlines for further research will be drawn. These, in turn, will lead to a new conceptualization of psychological theory and a redefinition of psychological explanation.
Until several years ago the dominance of RCVM was questioned only by dissenting minority voices. Perhaps the only such voice in North America was that of James Gibson’s (1966a, 1979) ecological psychology, a framework largely ignored by the professional establishment. In Europe, the situation was different. Indeed, alternative, non-representational views of mind were developed in the continent even before the representational-computational paradigm of contemporary cognitive science was conceived. Such views were originated by Bergson (1929), were extensively developed by Heidegger (1962) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) and are at the heart of the Piagetian enterprise (Piaget, 1983). Alternative frameworks have also been entertained in the Soviet Union by Vygotsky (1986) and his followers in the school of activity theory, as well as in Latin America in the theory of autopoiesis of Maturana and his students (Maturana, 1978; Maturana and Varela, 1980; see also Winograd and Flores, 1986). With few exceptions, mainline academic psychology has paid no attention to these works. Recently, however, a major shift has taken place. With the new school of connectionism (Hinton and Anderson, 1981; McClelland and Rumelhart, 1986a; Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986a) there is a veritable change in the Zeitgeist, and for the first time a non-representational perspective is entertained at the core of cognitive research, both psychological and computational.
While sympathetic to these recent developments, my critique is independent of them, in terms of both its course of development and the conceptual framework in which it is embedded. The critique summarizes an investigation that began when the reign of the representational-computational paradigm was virtually unchallenged (cf. Shanon, 1982a, 1983a, 1984a). Substantively, the argumentation on which it is based is different from that employed in connectionism. It is founded on a comprehensive consideration of psychological phenomenology rather than on computational, mathematical and biological considerations. Given this twofold independence, and since RCVM is still the most important general conceptual framework in psychology, the discussion takes dogma (*) to define cognitive orthodoxy. The conceptual framework thus defined is so fundamental that it calls for serious consideration even if the dogma has already lost its absolute hegemony. Furthermore, just as the lines of argumentation marshalled against the representational-computational view of mind may differ, so the alternatives to this view may vary. Towards the end of the book the differences between the present perspective and other non-representational frameworks will be spelled out and the possible relations between them will be examined.
The ideas to be presented here evolved in the course of seminars on conceptual issues in cognition that I have conducted at the Hebrew University since 1979. I cannot recall the first time when alternative views of cognition entered my mind (in retrospect, first signs are to be found in my doctoral dissertation - Shanon, 1974 - most of which seems, now, so distant). The first focal stimulants, however, were the philosophical works of Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor. The first of my seminars was devoted to the Chomsky-Piaget debate (Piatelli-Palmerini, 1980) and to The Language of Thought (Fodor, 1975). New works by Fodor came to the fore at an amazing speed, and they have been topics of study and discussion in the seminars practically every year. While much of the following discussion is directed against the conceptua